Through his vast number of translations, books, essays, prayers and letters, he is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the Northern Renaissance and one of the major figures of Dutch and Western culture.
He was an important figure in classical scholarship who wrote in a spontaneous, copious and natural Latin style. As a Catholic priest developing humanist techniques for working on texts, he prepared pioneering new Latin and Greek scholarly editions of the New Testament and of the Church Fathers , with annotations and commentary immediately and vitally influential in both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Reformation.
Erasmus lived against the backdrop of the growing European religious Reformations. He developed a biblical humanistic theology in which he advocated the religious and civil necessity both of peaceable concord and of pastoral tolerance on matters of indifference. He remained a member of the Catholic Church all his life, remaining committed to reforming the Church from within.
He promoted the traditional doctrine of synergism , which some prominent Reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin rejected in favor of the doctrine of monergism. His influential middle-road approach disappointed, and even angered, partisans in both camps. Erasmus's almost 70 years may be divided into quarters.
Desiderius Erasmus is reported to have been born in Rotterdam on 27 or 28 October "the vigil of Simon and Jude" [4] in the late s. The year of Erasmus' birth is unclear: in later life he calculated his age as if born in , but frequently his remembered age at major events actually implies Furthermore, many details of his early life must be gleaned from a fictionalized third-person account he wrote in published in in a letter to a fictitious Papal secretary, Lambertus Grunnius "Mr.
